Puffbox

You never hear much about the BBC News Select java application for mobile phones. It’s an excellent micro-browser, which pulls in the full text (and lead picture) of the top few stories from your choice of BBC News sections (including individual football teams). I’ve found it especially handy on the Tube; if you can get a signal long enough to get an update, you can still read the full stories when the signal drops. It’s free, and it’s compatible with loads of java-friendly phones.

Full marks to Lloyds TSB for their rapid response website helpimflooded. It looks like it was thrown together relatively quickly, in response to the flooding in the north of England – the DNS record shows the domain was registered on 5 July, a fortnight before the south got the worst of it. There are a few rough edges – spelling BBC wrong on the homepage, for example. But it just goes to show that it can be done.

A nod, too, to the new Living ‘blog’ launched by More Than insurance, working with Antony Mayfield‘s mates at Spannerworks. It looks very well done, all built in WordPress (so thumbs-up from me) and is very blog/mashup/2.0-literate. It’s a tangential project, more about brandbuilding than selling insurance… and I always wonder how sites like these can maintain an audience. But hey, they’ve got a page of flood advice too.

Not that flooding and insurance a subject currently dominating my thinking, or anything.

Quick note to Sky’s legal department. The Belfast Telegraph is getting some well-deserved attention for its extra-high-quality video news bulletins. They’re doing everything right: proper presenter, proper set (although clearly ‘virtual’), proper pacing etc. Delivered in Flash, although a full-screen playback option would be a useful addition. A TV news bulletin, without the TV bit.

But just a minute… that red, white and blue logo on horizontal blocks? The ‘video wall’ set, predominantly blue, with a slowly animating Planet Earth? Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?

Some interesting figures from Iain Dale, comparing political blogs’ traffic to national newspapers. He reckons the leading handful of blogs are all getting approx 250,000 unique visitors per month; which puts them in sight of several newspaper websites. Indeed, if these Press Gazette figures are correct, they’re already well beyond a few of them. (Am I the only one to be shocked at the appalling Mirror numbers, by the way?)

A very smart move by Sky: they’ve launched a Facebook app which pulls in a news feed (with pics) from its showbiz news website. Very nice ajax-y pagination within it, too. Not the first RSS-to-Facebook app I’ve seen, but certainly the most ‘mainstream’. I refer my honourable readers to the posting I made some weeks ago: Facebook as a friendlier environment for consuming RSS?

No sign of anything official coming from the BBC… but 2,300 people are using an unofficial tool instead. Sounds like a respectable number – but it pales in comparison with stupid stuff like that Zombies app, which has a startling 2.35m users.

Shane Richmond discloses a few extra figures about My Telegraph usage, in the comments on his previous piece: ‘perhaps a third of the (7,000) members are now active bloggers… the hundred or so most active bloggers are the ones people notice the most.’ That leaves two-thirds of the membership either commenting on Telegraph blogs (pro or amateur), using the RSS aggregation function, or doing nothing in particular. As Tom Jones might say, it’s not an unusual usage pattern.

(Thanks to Mr Collister for spotting the update.)

According to Jemima at the Guardian…

BSkyB has announced that it plans to appoint two web explorers to push innovation by flagging up new sites, services and technologies that Sky could use on its digital platforms. The official remit is to work with two Sky project managers to “discover online talent in the UK and worldwide”, and to build relationships with content creators. Does anyone else know of similar roles at big media companies? I haven’t heard of any and this sounds pretty jammy. But then it is based in Osterley, so every silver lining…

A great post by Shane Richmond over at the Telegraph reveals some hard numbers on the site’s ‘blogging platform’, My Telegraph. After a quarter year’s operation (near enough), they’ve signed up a respectable 7,000 members, three-quarters of whom are 40 or older. I doubt many blogging platforms could claim that kind of demographic, which would seem to justify the Telegraph’s move into this space, and may encourage others to follow. Some data about activity levels would have been nice, though?

The Mirror‘s web efforts have been the subject of considerable ridicule: not least on this blog. But they’re doing something interesting on YouTube at the moment: ‘Football Spy’, a daily roundup of summer football transfer gossip, done from (what looks like) a regular ‘studio’ setup at Mirror HQ. Not just from their own paper, but from their deadliest rivals.

In my experience, traffic to football websites actually increases (dramatically) during the offseason: fans are desperate to find out who their clubs are looking to sign; and they aren’t too bothered if the gossip is especially accurate. Just as long as it’s something to talk about, keeping the boredom at bay until it all kicks off again. This is a smart move by the Mirror… although the video quality could be a bit better.

The same clips also appear within the Mirror site itself; but I certainly wouldn’t have come across them there.

I may be prepared to forgive the BBC for all the iPlayer’s usability headaches (of which there are many). As mentioned earlier, I downloaded the Top Gear polar special – and at the end of the day, it all worked. I was able to watch the show in full screen on my uncommonly large widescreen PC monitor. The picture maybe lacked a bit of sharpness, but it was perfectly watchable throughout, and the audio was nigh-on faultless.

And incidentally, the show itself was magnificent. Almost no mention of cars; instead, it was what journalists frequently refer to as ‘Boy’s Own stuff’, without necessarily knowing what Boy’s Own was. Three ordinary blokes attempting to reach the North Pole – one using conventional means, the other two in a 4×4. Who gets there first? Beautifully shot, perfectly paced, wonderfully edited. Drama, adrenaline, and the sort of scenery which just makes you gasp. Clarkson & co are in cracking form, too. Award-winning stuff, if there’s any justice.

(Some technical data for those who care about such things: 387MB for an hour’s telly, a bit rate of 860Kbps. Picture in a rather unusual 7:4 ratio, at 672×384 pixels – that’s fractionally narrower than the normal 16:9 widescreen. Encoded using Windows Media 9 for both audio and video. The DRM gives you a week to watch it; no ‘collaborative play’, no burning, no synchronising. In other words, it’s your PC or nothing.)